And I say that the
English reliance on our religious organizations and on their ideas of
human perfection just as they stand, is like our reliance on freedom, on
muscular Christianity, on population, on coal, on wealth,--mere belief
in machinery, and unfruitful; and that it is wholesomely counteracted by
culture, bent on seeing things as they are, and on drawing the human
race onwards to a more complete, a harmonious perfection.
Culture, however, shows its single-minded love of perfection, its desire
simply to make reason and the will of God prevail, its freedom from
fanaticism, by its attitude towards all this machinery, even while it
insists that it _is_ machinery. Fanatics, seeing the mischief men do
themselves by their blind belief in some machinery or other,--whether it
is wealth and industrialism, or whether it is the cultivation of bodily
strength and activity, or whether it is a political organization,--or
whether it is a religious organization,--oppose with might and main the
tendency to this or that political and religious organization, or to
games and athletic exercises, or to wealth and industrialism, and try
violently to stop it.
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